Jumping into Otome Games

With the surprising immediate success of our new Bad Translation Series yesterday, I wanted to quickly find more games we could throw up there. I remembered Alice in the Heart, an otome game (romance games aimed at girls) with one of the worst translations ever released. Unfortunately, that was a mobile game, and it’s no longer available to purchase anywhere, so in a sense it’s gone forever (one reason I dislike mobile games). So I went on a search to find other poorly-translated mobile otome games.

So far, my search has turned up nothing that comes remotely close to Alice in the Heart. At most, the games I found just need better editing. Here are some examples of my favorite mess-ups:

Yeah! Let’s post on hundreds of spider webs!

ehhhh… *insert doge meme parody here*

Besides the typo, I don’t like how the picture doesn’t match the description 🙁

These were published by Hanabi Media, I dunno who the dev was though. I’ve been enjoying them quite a bit, haha. Especially the ones where I’m out of high school and have a career. I can relate to that much more than silly high school feelings.

Yes, one issue I have with a lot of visual novels is that they’re set in high school. This is a lot of the trouble I’ve had getting into Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel also, which is a game I really want to like, but has these interminable sequences set in high school. I don’t desire to choose my club activities or whatever, guys.

Haha yeah same. I was playing one yesterday where the girl had absolutely no confidence in herself, so she used magic to transform herself into some glamorous lady before going on a date with the most popular boy in school. I could not put up with that, that’s lying to both him and yourself, so I deleted the game after that.

Nothing warms the cockles of my icy black heart like scene descriptions that entirely fail to match the picture. I sent a shot to Clyde some time ago from the original localisation of Ys 8, with Olga saying to Dana “there’s not a cloud in the sky,” with the heavily overcast sky hanging in the background behind the conversation. Good stuff!

Which reminds me: the relocalisation patch is out. Gotta find time to check that out. 😮

Hoooo boy, there are so many examples in these games of the picture not matching the description. I suspect they have a bunch of default graphics that they just have to match as best as they can to the writing.

I’ve not played these in particular, so I can’t say, but a lot of “budget” visual novels are made that way — they purchase some premade art assets and try to fit some text to them. It’s also fairly common for studios to use the same art in multiple games.

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A lot is always going on behind the scenes of our Legends of Localization projects. Here, we’ll share some inside looks at what we’re up to and share cool photos + info of our research materials, most of which never gets seen in our main articles & books!